Brown’s sword of honor

At a time when Brown University has endured some national ribbing for nude events on campus and the shabby treatment of an invited speaker, the bravura recovery of a lost sword of commemoration should...

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Posted Nov. 14, 2013 @ 12:01 am

At a time when Brown University has endured some national ribbing for nude events on campus and the shabby treatment of an invited speaker, the bravura recovery of a lost sword of commemoration should lift its spirits.

The Tiffany presentation sword, one of only a few made by the famous jeweler, was awarded to Col. Rush Hawkins by his regiment and 50 prominent New Yorkers for raising and leading the 9th New York City Volunteers in the Civil War. It was stolen in the mid-1970s from the Annmary Brown Memorial, which Hawkins built and named in honor of his wife, a granddaughter of university founder Nicholas Brown, which now holds paintings from the colonel’s art collection and their graves, in a small crypt.

The sword went from thief to collector to collector for decades, ending up on loan to a house museum in Newport News, Va., where it was recognized. Brown sued for its recovery, but the owners — collectors Donald and Toni Tharpe of Williamsburg, Va. — fought hard to hang on to the treasure, valued at $750,000, which they bought for $35,000.

It does Brown credit that it fought so vigorously to rescue the sword, whose possession embraces so much institutional history. Annmary Brown’s sister Carrie married an Italian diplomat who built the Carrie Tower on the Brown campus in her honor. (The Bajnotti Fountain in downtown’s Burnside Park is also a tribute to Carrie Brown.)

Faced with the Tharpes’ tactics of delay and obstruct, Brown general counsel Beverly Ledbetter summed up the university’s attitude toward the sword in court: “Our legal strategy is simple. We own it, it was stolen, we want it back.”

Not exactly “We came, we saw, we conquered” — Julius Caesar’s famous line — but almost, and it worked. In an era of overweening complexity, Brown has succeeded by sticking straightforwardly to an honorable purpose. Good work!